Largest Meteorite Collection on the West Coast!

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The UCLA Meteorite Collection has been assembled by cosmochemist John Wasson and Alan Rubin and their colleagues at UCLA.
There are more than 1500 meteorites in the collection. About 100 of these are exhibited in the meteorite gallery.

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The UCLA Meteorite Collection

The UCLA Collection of Meteorites is the largest on the West Coast
and contains over 2400 samples from about 1500 different meteorites. It
is the fifth largest collection of meteorites in the United States and
the second largest housed at a university.

Our collection includes the main masses of about 40
meteorites and the type specimens of more than 300 meteorites
collected from hot deserts; 60 of these are iron meteorites. Eighty of
these meteorite type specimens are from the state of California.
These were collected by local citizens during the past few decades,
mainly from the playas (dry lakes) scattered around the Mojave
Desert.

Some of our meteorites are large and well suited for exhibits (in
fact, some of them are exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Natural History). However, most of the samples are small and mainly
of value for research.

The study of meteorites and the processes that formed them is called
cosmochemistry. The cosmochemists at UCLA are among the most
productive university researchers in the world. It is thus appropriate
that we have one of the best university meteorite collections.

We are in the early stages of developing a meteorite exhibit which
is located in room 3697 of the Geology Building. The Meteorite Gallery
is open weekdays from 9 am to 4 pm. The initial exhibit is the first
draft of the final exhibit which will gradually expand as funds are
obtained and we continue to invest time. The UCLA Meteorite Gallery opened in January, 2014.

We are eager to add meteorites to the UCLA
collection. If you have a meteorite collection and live in California,
we would like to hear from you. You can contact us
here.